


Out Little Ghost Situation

by ossapher



Category: American Revolution RPF
Genre: Eliza's angry dead grandma, F/M, Gen, Ghosts, Haunted Houses, Horror influences, turns very fluffy at the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-02
Updated: 2015-11-02
Packaged: 2018-04-29 12:17:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5127314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ossapher/pseuds/ossapher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Halloween, I wrote a ghost story. Shortly after the end of the Revolution, Alexander and Eliza attempt to spend the night in the house that once belonged to her grandmother. Little do they know that Oma does NOT approve of Alexander.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Out Little Ghost Situation

“Alexander, the baby’s asleep.” Eliza whispers, cracking the door to the library. They are borrowing a house upstate from her mother’s eldest sister for the Christmas holiday; a welcome escape from too-crowded New York City. Eliza used to stay here as a girl, and has fond memories of the place—scurrying through the halls with Angelica, avoiding Oma Rensselaer’s forbidding glare—but the house is too big for three, and bedroom is cold and lonely and faintly disquieting without her husband there. “Are you coming to bed?”

No reply, so Eliza cracks the door a little further. The room is too warm and stuffy, a log glowing dim and orange in the fireplace. Her husband is slumped on the settee, still dressed, one hand dangling. Below a book lies open against the floor, its pages bent.

It’s the book that frightens her. Alexander treasures his books, cossets them like old women cosset small dogs. She opens the door fully, spilling moonlight into the room, casting her shadow long on the floor and across the old rocking-chair facing the fireplace. She steps inside. “Alexander?”

A cold draft, and the door slams shut behind her. Alexander doesn’t move. She shouldn’t be afraid—he’s so still—he’s just asleep—so why is her heart stuttering with fear? The heat is a third presence in the room, dull and hostile.

“Alexander!” Her voice comes out sharper than she intended as she steps around the rocking-chair, moving to his side. His eyes open blearily, and he rubs them with the heel of his hand.

“Are you all right, darling?” She tries to sound light, carefree, but her instincts say something is wrong. The dim orange glow from the fireplace throws deep shadows in the hollows of his eyes.

"I…” He lowers his hand to cover his eyes. “Eliza?” He sounds wretched.

“You came up here just after suppertime.” Eliza kneels by the settee and picks up the book, gently unfolding its damaged pages before handing it to him. “You must have fallen asleep reading.”

Alexander half-props himself up, limbs shaking. He’s looking at something over her shoulder, his pupils and his eyes both wide. “Eliza, she’s here. Run.”

 _Run_? She must have misheard. Eliza fights the urge to look over her shoulder, where Alexander is staring; she just walked past that space, knows that there is nothing there. Her mouth is dry, her stomach twisting, but she forces herself to stick to the script: dutiful wife, husband slightly under the weather. “Is your head bothering you? Are you feeling ill?”

He gasps, hand pressed hard against his forehead in pain. “Run! Please, run!”

Eliza moves closer, feeling his face for fever, and he tries to push her back. There is precious little strength in his arm, and his hand trembles. He collapses back on the settee, a movement as uncoordinated as he usually is graceful.         

“Go,” he moans. “Before she catches you, _please_ , go…”

“Stop talking nonsense, darling,” Eliza gathers him to herself, one arm round his shoulders, gently levering him upright. The heat from the fire presses against her skin. “Nobody else is here.”

Alexander makes a noise like a sob. His eyes are still fixed on the point over her shoulder.“S-sorry.”

“What for?” Eliza tries to keep her tone light. She pushes back the hair that has fallen over his forehead and he shudders, lines etched into his face.

“She told me not to love you and I can’t, I can’t do it, she says _get out of my house_ and I can’t, ‘Liza, I love…she’s angry, Eliza, can’t you feel it?”

She, part of Eliza’s mind points out, but Eliza refuses to entertain the thought, won’t even name it in her mind. An odd pressure builds in her head. A sound, past the edge of hearing, like the rustling of old papers, and above it, a gentle _creak, creak, creak._

“…Creole bastard,” Alexander mutters, “don’t you touch my child, get out of my house, get out get out get out—or _join me_ —”

 _Oma_ is the first thing that comes to Eliza’s mind. She slaps the thought away. Yes, Oma Rensselaer would have hated the fact that Eliza married so far below her station, but Oma has been dead for years, and Eliza does not believe in—in—

It occurs to Eliza, unhelpfully, that this room was once Oma’s study. That the rocking-chair just over her shoulder, where Alexander is looking, is where Oma would always sit as she read her Bible. That Oma would sit and rock and the sound the chair made was a gentle _creak, creak, creak_ …

Dizziness overcomes her, and she has to steady herself with one hand on the floor. The pressure in her head is mounting, becoming pain.

A hysterical sound, and she is not sure if it came from Alexander or her. Alexander hisses out, “ _She sees you_ —” He tears her eyes away from the thing over her shoulder to look at Eliza at last. Eliza stares back at the frightened creature in her arms, and she realizes three fundamental truths at the exact same time: _Oma will kill him if she can_ and _he cannot carry himself_ and the last, a command,  ** _get him out NOW_** —

Eliza seizes Alexander under the arms and hauls him to his feet.

“No no no, she wants me, she’ll take me—run!” He squirms out of her grasp; Eliza trips over the skirt of her nightgown and takes him down with her. She lands with a painful thud, and he barely manages to avoid falling on top of her, crashing hard against a low-slung table on the way down. Her eyes almost fall on the rocking chair, and she squeezes them shut at the last moment. She doesn’t want to see—they have to get out—

Before Alexander can recover she hauls one of his arms over her shoulders and gets them both upright. He can hardly keep his feet, listing like a sinking ship, and he lets out a cry of pain, clutching at his forehead. _He’s hurt—she hurt him—get out get out **get out** —_

Eliza clenches her jaw against the pain in her head and staggers forward bearing her husband’s weight across her shoulders. Twice he slips and once she nearly drops him, but they move fast all the same, raw fear feeding her strength. She expects at any moment to be struck down by the same malevolent force that has broken him body and mind.

They make it to the door. Eliza opens and the cold, fresher air of the hall rushes in. When she has Alexander safely through and propped up against the wall, she slams the door shut and latches it. It is a comfort to have a cold iron lock between Oma and her husband.

“Now,” she says, heaving a deep breath and turning to him, “Let’s get you out of here.”

His eyes go wide; he’s shaking like a leaf. “You want me out, too?” he whispers.

“Never, dearest,” she says, gently touching his cheek and hoping he cannot see that her hand is trembling, too. “But you seem ill, and some fresh air might do you good.” Oma always hated the cold, always sat in that horrible stuffy old room in her rocking chair, couldn’t stand having the door open, couldn’t stand the drafts. Eliza likes the lock, but she likes the thought of the winter air even better.

Alexander leans heavily on her all the way down the back staircase, breath coming short and panicked, eyes darting everywhere.

Outside the influence of that terrible room, Eliza is less inclined to look for a supernatural explanation. Perhaps Alexander has been poisoned, or drugged. Perhaps he has cracked under the combined weight of his law practice and writing the Federalist Papers—perhaps he has gone mad. She feels sick with worry for him.

The servants’ door is just off the landing. “Only a little farther. You’re doing so well.” Eliza forces open the door and steps out into the snow in her slippers and nightgown, Alexander stumbling along behind her. Goosebumps instantly appear on her arms.

They’ve stood in the frigid cold for a good three minutes, Alexander leaning on her heavily, before he begins fumbling at the buttons of his coat.

“No—dearest, you need that—” Eliza catches his hands in alarm.

He gives her a resolute glare, for a moment looking almost like his usual self. “My wife is not freezing to death on my watch.”

Eliza let out an enormous sigh of relief, going up in a cloud in the frigid night air. She already has one arm behind his back for support; it’s a simple matter to turn it into an embrace. Leaning her head against his chest, she says, “There’s my Alexander.” A moment later, the coat settles over her shoulders, heavy and still radiating his heat.

With both arms around her husband, Eliza can tell he’s still wobbly at best. “Your head still hurts?” she whispers.

“Abominably.” A pause. “Eliza, did I say anything…odd, up there?”

She lets out a hysterical giggle. “Perhaps you were a touch unusual.”

“I barely remember—there was a woman, I think. She was furious you had married me. But now… I don’t know if I even saw her. I think she was in my head.”

Another sigh of relief. “There was no one there but me, dear.” She is almost entirely certain she speaks the truth. “And I for one am glad I married you.”

“Even now?”

And here is the secret she keeps for herself, from all of the city’s society: that Alexander Hamilton, the legal world’s notoriously brash, devastatingly competent, hard-driving phenomenon, is still somehow incredulous that he has earned her love. “Even now,” she says, patting his back.

“Betsey,” he whispers, his favorite name for her, “Am I going mad?”

“It was probably only the fireplace,” Eliza supplies: the most obvious theory, really, one she should have come to the moment she stepped into the library’s stifling heat. “The smoke can have strange influences upon one’s mind, especially in a closed room. We should clean out the chimney.”

“And fresh air cures it?”

 _Lord, what a wondrous creature you are_ , Eliza thinks. Alexander’s erudition is so impressive, it is all the more stunning to occasionally stumble across seemingly basic facts of which he has somehow remained ignorant. But of course Alexander does not know this—he’s not from upstate New York, where every child knows the risk of a fire in a shut-up room. “In most cases.” She does not add, _the alternative explanation is that the ghost of my grandmother is trying to murder you_. “It’s, ah, probably best if we avoid the study, in the meantime.”

Alexander laughs and holds her tighter. “You’re simply the best wife in the world, Betsey, do you know that?”

“Oh, shush.”

He shifts slightly; she steadies his elbow in case he’s falling, but he’s only leaning over to look at her feet. “Are you—are you wearing house slippers?”

“Yes.”

Alexander makes an appalled noise. “Back inside. Now. Before your feet fall off.”

“And there’s my Lieutenant Colonel,” Eliza grumbles, but returns to the shelter of the doorway, taking off the snow-soaked slippers and drying her feet on the rug.

Alexander paces back and forth, boots crunching through the crust of fresh-fallen snow. After a few turns he crouches down, scoops up a handful of snow, and rubs it against his face. “Go get warm by the fire, Eliza. I’ll be along in a moment.”

“No.”

Alexander turns incredulously to face her. “No?”

“No. What if—what if you have another… attack? Some wife I would be, if I left you here to die in the cold.”

“I don’t want you to wait too long to warm your feet up.”

“I suppose you’ll have to be quick, then!”

Alexander adopts a mock-scolding expression. “Elizabeth—”

“No. Come inside, or you’ll catch your death of cold.”

“ _My_ death? You’re the one standing in the doorway in your nightgown and wet slippers!”

“And _your_ coat.” Eliza sticks out her tongue. This earns her the smile that captured her heart, the smile she can never say no to. Fortunately, he doesn’t test her; Alexander acquiesces to her request to come inside with good humor. He scoops her up off the ground as he walks in. “Can’t have cold feet on the cold floor, now, can we?”

“Put me down!” she giggles helplessly. “Alexander, ten minutes ago you couldn’t walk a straight line—”

He pretends to stagger to one side; she lets out an involuntary shriek and swats his ear in not-quite-mock anger. He sets her on the floor, contrite and feather-light.

“I have something to attend to upstairs. Alone. It shan’t take five minutes.” She is going to reclaim her house.

Alexander produces his pocket-watch—her Christmas gift to him—with a cheeky grin. “Five minutes it is, then.”

She doesn’t reply, only glides barefoot up the stairs with her head held high. Once in the library, she flings open every window, douses the embers of the fire, and uses the poker to knock a truly astonishing quantity of ash out of the chimney. Then she takes a seat in her grandmother’s old rocking-chair.

“Now, Oma, it seems we have some things to discuss.” Eliza begins to rock, back and forth, a gentle _creak, creak, creak._ “I know you’ve taken exception to my husband. No, don’t try to deny it. You’ve made your feelings quite clear. It’s only fair I get the chance to do the same.”

Eliza pauses for a moment, but her conversation partner is not forthcoming. The fire stirs a little; a pop of embers bright in the darkness.

“I love you, Oma, but you don’t have a say in who my family is. This house belongs to the living, and so in a way it is mine. You are my guest, and I expect you to be civil. You have no right to dictate who I spend my time with or my love upon. Alexander is my family now, and you will accept him or—”

A gust of wind comes howling in the windows. A candlestick blows over and clangs against the floor; a picture falls off the wall. Eliza clutches Alexander’s coat tighter around herself and bellows, “…OR YOU WILL _GET! OUT! OF MY! HOUSE!_ ”

The wind cuts off like a choked-back scream, and then it is just Eliza in the rocking-chair, chest heaving, hair in disarray.

Footsteps at the door. Eliza glances over, pretending to dust off her hands. “I thought I told you to stay downstairs.”

“I heard unearthly howls,” Alexander shrugs from the doorway. “But it seems you had our little ghost situation under control.”

Eliza only sniffs. “It was a remote possibility, but one can never take too many precautions for one’s health.” In any case, she has laid claim to the house now; if there ever was a ghost, it is no more. “We can go to bed now, darling.”


End file.
